New art exhibition based on ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore comes to Clare

Clare Arts Office will host SIÚNTA, an exhibition of contemporary art in Súil Gallery, Ennis, until October 4.

The exhibition features the work of Dublin-based artist Niamh Coffey, originally from Co Laois. Niamh works primarily through textiles, drawing and sculpture. Their work experiments and collages ideas from ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore.

Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, SIÚNTA weaves together different narratives into imagined ecological relationships. Forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather, mingle and merge. Subjects develop symbiotic relationships, exhibit unfamiliar actions and create new habits together.

In 1937 to 1939, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies and detailed in meticulous handwriting lie tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.

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The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them. Narratives eventually emerged from this process and were brought into a textile world, a medium used because of its rich history with collaborative storytelling, connotations of gender and queerness and its ability to physically join separate elements together.

This work is guided by the concept of queer ecology, which asks us to abandon ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and instead asks us to see humans as part of a complex and interwoven system, whose patterns and processes are different from our own.

The official launch of SIÚNTA will take place on Saturday, 13 September from 2pm.

To celebrate the close of the exhibition, Niamh will host a free drawing workshop on October 4 from 1-2pm. All materials will be provided and those aged 16 and over are welcome.

For more information and booking email: suil@clarecoco.ie.